As part of a series in which Booker authors choose their favourite Booker books, Anuk Arudpragasam takes a look at John Berger's 1972 winner.
Writers reading writers
Anuk Arudpragasam on John Berger's G.
'The great pleasure that G. offers comes from the wide and sensitive intelligence visible in such passages, the author's unembarrassed earnestness about life's mysteries.'
Anuk Arudpragasam, author of the 2021 Booker Prize-shortlisted A Passage North, writes about why he thinks John Berger's 1972 Booker Prize-winning novel G. is 'hugely impressive'.
Written by Anuk Arudpragasam
Publication date and time: Published November 6, 2022
John Berger's hugely impressive 1972 novel G. follows the erotic pursuits of an apolitical young man in Europe on the eve of the First World War. From a contemporary point of view its reliance on the trope of the directionless libertine can feel a little outdated, but what makes the novel worth reading generations later, for this reader at least, are the passages of startling analytic and phenomenological insight that frequently interrupt its larger personal and historical narratives.
Consider, for example, Berger's account of how managing oneself in a moment of debilitating fear is like carrying a full jug that one must never allow to spill, or his long description of how, in the moment of physical shock accompanying a road accident, consciousness seems to retract from the body's surfaces. Or look at his striking passage about our relationship to dawn and dusk, which begins by pointing out that our immersion within the small compass of daily life is so complete, usually, that we become aware of ourselves and our environments only during moments of dramatic exterior change. At dawn and dusk, in virtue of the rapid transformations of light, we are called back to ourselves more intensely than at any other time of day, Berger writes, and so 'the experience of day breaking or of night falling is somewhat less subject to historical change than the experience of days themselves'. The great pleasure that G. offers comes from the wide and sensitive intelligence visible in such passages, the author's unembarrassed earnestness about life's mysteries, qualities so un-English and so seldom seen in English literature they feel vivid and original almost half a century later.
John Berger on stage at the Festival d'Avignon 2012, during the performance of Est Ce Que Tu Dors?
© Pascal Victor/ArtComPress / Bridgeman Images
Sometimes, like the protagonist of G., who was abandoned in childhood, one is compelled to parent oneself
It isn't difficult, if one wishes, to read the didactic tone of these passages, the certainty and matter-of-factness of the third-person narrator, as displays of intellectual hubris. Berger, though, is too aware of his fallibility to believe that he speaks from any pedestal. (The frequent references to his own authorial strategies in the text, one feels, are slightly awkward attempts to acknowledge that he too stands within the human fray.) If there is paternalism in Berger's willingness to pronounce with certainty on the complexities of experience, for this reader, it is not the arrogant paternalism of the professor or the moralist but the gentle paternalism of the parent who seeks to provide reassurance to the bewildered child – the parent who is aware of their own limitations but insists nevertheless on performing certainty as an act of tenderness, so the child can be convinced that there is nothing to fear, that the world is vast but also knowable, secure and also beautiful.
The childlike need for such assurances and the parental desire to provide them may, of course, co-exist in the same individual. Sometimes, like the protagonist of G., who was abandoned in childhood, one is compelled to parent oneself. The sense that this may be true of Berger too is what makes this novel not just intellectually rewarding but quietly, soothingly moving.
Anuk Arudpragasam is the author of A Passage North, shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize.
Monument of the Four Moors, Livorno, Italy. "In G. the statue of the four chained Moors is the most important single image of the book." John Berger in his Booker Prize acceptance speech, 1972.
© Franck Guiziou / Hemis / Alamy
Explore the Booker library
A Passage North was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. Anuk Arudpragasam's masterful novel is an attempt to come to terms with life in the wake of the devastation of Sri Lanka's 30-year civil war.
By Anuk Arudpragasam
John Berger relates the story of 'G'., a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the twentieth century.
From A to X
John Berger imagines a besieged community that finds transcendent hope in the pain and fragility, vulnerability and sorrow of daily existence.
Anuk Arudpragasam Q&A
'I view each book I write as a kind of apprenticeship to writers I want to emulate'
Lockwood on A.S. Byatt's Possession
Patricia Lockwood chooses A.S. Byatt's Possession, a much-loved book that gave Lockwood 'permission' to pursue her literary passion: 'it was not a waste of time, not a waste of life, to read'.
Richard Powers on Offshore
As part of a series for the Booker website, shortlisted writers choose a book from the Booker Library that has had a profound impact on them. Richard Powers reaches out of his comfort zone to pick up Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore, which, when he finally puts it down, leaves him 'a different kind of reader'.
Damon Galgut on How late it was, how late
2021 Booker Prize-shortlisted Damon Galgut, author of The Promise, on why he loves Kelman's 1994 winner How late it was, how late.
Anuk Arudpragasam was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. He is an award-winning Sri Lankan Tamil novelist.
John Berger was born in London and educated at St Edward's School, Oxford. In 1962, he left Britain permanently, to live in a small village in the French Alps.
John Berger and the 1972 Booker Prize controversy
Seeing G.: John Berger, the Black Panthers and the Booker, 50 years on
Multiple winners and nominees of the Booker Prize
Booker Prize winners
'I have to turn the prize against itself': John Berger's 1972 Booker Prize speech in full
Behind the scenes: the Booker Prize and book binding
The Big Jubilee Read: 21 Booker books to celebrate the reign of Queen Elizabeth II
The 2021 Booker shortlisted authors, live and in person
The 2021 shortlist: what our judges said
Q&As with the 2021 nominated authors
A glimpse behind the scenes: The Booker at 50